The apportionment of storage resources has been done in the prior art within a system complex, such as in the IBM MVS/System Resource Manager (SRM), which controls the allocation of storage and other resources to executing tasks in the computer system. Storage is apportioned among a plurality of domains by swapping pages of data between main storage and a DASD (direct access storage device), based on measurements and resulting calculations made over each of periodic time intervals.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,702,006 and 4,183,083 are examples of the load balancing of I/O device operations, in which counts over a time interval are periodically used to compute the allocation of tasks to the I/O devices.
Hardware cache storage and system main storage have been managed using the reclaiming of space on a least recently used (LRU) basis. The IBM/MVS operating system has freed space in the main memory of computer systems by swapping out pages of data to DASD. Thresholds have been used to determine when reclaiming should be done to free space in advance of when memory becomes full. Such data management processes are being used to control reclaiming of storage space using LRU selection of pages to be reclaimed for replacement by new data.
The term "class" has previously been used in record processing control, such as in the VM/370 spool file class for controlling printing, punching and networking operations. However, it has never been known to have been used in relation to storage control processing within any SES type of entity.
The subject invention builds on the prior art to obtain not obvious improvements.